Nagel v Nietzsche: Dawn of Consciousness

While we’re on the subject of Nietzsche: The Will to Power, which is a collection of passages on a variety of subjects from Nietzsche’s notebooks, contains some interesting remarks on consciousness, sensory qualities, and related topics.  They invite a “compare and contrast” with ideas which, in contemporary philosophy, are perhaps most famously associated with Thomas Nagel.  In some ways, Nietzsche seems to anticipate and agree with points made by Nagel.  In other respects, they disagree radically.

Feyerabend on empiricism and sola scriptura

In his essay “Classical Empiricism,” available in Problems of Empiricism: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2, philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend compares the empiricism of the early moderns to the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura.  He suggests that there are important parallels between them; in particular, he finds them both incoherent, and for the same reasons.  (No, Feyerabend is not doing Catholic apologetics.  He’s critiquing empiricism.)

Post-intentional depression

A reader asks me to comment on novelist Scott Bakker’s recent Scientia Salon article “Back to Square One: toward a post-intentional future.”  “Intentional” is a reference to intentionality, the philosopher’s technical term for the meaningfulness or “aboutness” of our thoughts -- the way they are “directed toward,” “point to,” or are about something.  A “post-intentional” future is one in which we’ve given up trying to explain intentionality in scientific terms and instead abandon it altogether in favor of radically re-describing human nature exclusively in terms drawn from neuroscience, physics, chemistry, and the like.  In short, it is a future in which we embrace the eliminative materialist position associated with philosophers like Alex Rosenberg and Paul and Patricia Churchland.

Della Rocca on PSR

The principle of sufficient reason (PSR), in a typical Neo-Scholastic formulation, states that “there is a sufficient reason or adequate necessary objective explanation for the being of whatever is and for all attributes of any being” (Bernard Wuellner, Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy, p. 15).  I discuss and defend PSR at some length in Scholastic Metaphysics (see especially pp. 107-8 and 137-46).  Prof. Michael Della Rocca defends the principle in his excellent article “PSR,” which appeared in Philosopher’s Imprint in 2010 but which (I’m embarrassed to say) I only came across the other day.

Among the arguments for PSR I put forward in Scholastic Metaphysics are a retorsion argument to the effect that if PSR were false, we could have no reason to trust the deliverances of our cognitive faculties, including any grounds we might have for doubting or denying PSR; and an argument to the effect that a critic of PSR cannot coherently accept even the scientific explanations he does accept, unless he acknowledges that there are no brute facts and thus that PSR is true.  Della Rocca’s argument bears a family resemblance to this second line of argument.

Gelernter on computationalism

People have asked me to comment on David Gelernter’s essay on minds and computers in the January issue of Commentary.  It’s written with Gelernter’s characteristic brio and clarity, and naturally I agree with the overall thrust of it.  But it seems to me that Gelernter does not quite get to the heart of the problem with the computer model of the mind.  What he identifies, I would argue, are rather symptoms of the deeper problems.  Those deeper problems are three, and longtime readers of this blog will recognize them.  The first two have more to do with the computationalist’s notion of matter than with his conception of mind.

Present perfect

Dale Tuggy has replied to my remarks about his criticism of the classical theist position that God is not merely “a being” alongside other beings but rather Being Itself.   Dale had alleged that “this is not a Christian view of God” and even amounts to “a kind of atheism.”  In response I pointed out that in fact this conception of God is, historically, the majority position among theistic philosophers in general and Christian philosophers in particular.  Dale replies:

Three comments. First, some of [Feser’s] examples are ambiguous cases. Perfect Being theology goes back to Plato, and some, while repeating Platonic standards about God being “beyond being” and so on, seem to think of God as a great self. No surprise there, of course, in the case of Bible readers. What’s interesting is how they held – or thought they held – these beliefs consistently together. Second, who cares who’s in the majority? Truth, I’m sure he’ll agree, is what matters. Third, it is telling that Feser starts with Plato and ends with Scotus and “a gazillion” Scholastics. Conspicuous by their absence are most of the Greats from early modern philosophy. Convenient, because most of them hold, with Descartes, that our concept of God is the “…idea of a Being who is omniscient, omnipotent and absolutely perfect… which is absolutely necessary and eternal.” (Principles of Philosophy 14)

Philip Kitcher, bait-and-switcher

Here’s a thumbnail history of philosophy and science since the early modern period, in three stages.  First, the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition had by the beginning of this period hammered out a conception of the natural world that is at the same time unified and radically anti-reductionist.  It is unified insofar as to all natural phenomena we can apply the theory of act and potency, the hylemorphic analysis of material substances, the doctrine of the four causes, and other components of Aristotelian philosophy of nature.  It is radically anti-reductionist insofar as it affirms that certain divisions in nature -- between the inorganic and the organic; between the merely “vegetative” or non-sentient forms of life and the sensory or animal forms; and between the merely sensory or animal forms of life and the distinctively rational or human form -- are nevertheless differences in kind rather than degree.

Man is Wolff to man

As a follow-up to my series of posts on the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, let’s take a look at philosopher Robert Paul Wolff’s recent remarks about the book.  Wolff is not nasty, as some of the critics have been -- Nagel is Wolff’s “old friend and one-time student” -- but he is nevertheless as unfair to Nagel as some of them have been. 

Most of his post is not about Nagel at all, but consists of an anecdote about Edward O. Wilson and some remarks about the wealth of knowledge Wolff has found in the biology books he’s read.  The point is to illustrate how very meticulous good scientists can be, and how much they have discovered about the biological realm.  All well and good.  But so what?  What does that have to do with Nagel?

Mad dogs and eliminativists

As an epilogue to my critique of Alex Rosenberg’s paper “Eliminativism without Tears,” let’s take a brief look at Rosenberg’s recent interview at 3:AM Magazine.  The interviewer styles Rosenberg “the mad dog naturalist.”  So perhaps in his bid to popularize eliminative materialism, Rosenberg could put out a “Weird Al” style parody of the old Noël Coward song.  Or maybe he and fellow eliminativist Paul Churchland could do a re-make of ZZ Top’s classic Eliminator album.  Don’t know if they’re sharp-dressed men, but they’ve got the beards.  (I can see the video now: The guys, electric guitars swaying in unison and perhaps assisted by Pat Churchland in a big 80s hairdo, set straight some benighted young grad student who still thinks the propositional attitudes are worth salvaging.  Romance ensues, as does a job at a Leiter-ranked philosophy department…)

Eliminativism without truth, Part I

Suppose you hold that a good scientific explanation should make no reference to teleology, final causality, purpose, directedness-toward-an-end, or the like as an inherent and irreducible feature of the natural order.  And suppose you hold that what is real is only what science tells us is real.  Then you are at least implicitly committed to denying that even human purposes or ends are real, and also to denying that the intentionality of thought and the semantic content of speech and writing are real.  Scientism, in short, entails a radical eliminativism.  Alex Rosenberg and I agree on that much -- he defends this thesis in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality and I defend it in The Last Superstition.  Where we differ is over the lesson to be drawn from this thesis.  Rosenberg holds that scientism is true, so that eliminativism must be true as well.  I maintain that eliminativism is incoherent, and constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of the scientism that leads to it.  I responded to Rosenberg at length in a series of posts on his book.

In his paper “Eliminativism without Tears,” Rosenberg attempts in a more systematic way than he has elsewhere to respond to the charge of incoherence.  Rosenberg kindly sent me this paper some time ago, and I note that it is now available online.

Hart stopping

In the August/September issue of First Things, David Bentley Hart gives us what he promises is his last word on the controversy generated by his article on natural law in the March issue.  I responded to Hart’s original piece in “A Christian Hart, a Humean Head,” posted at the First Things website (and cross-posted here).  Hart replied to my criticisms in a follow-up article in the May issue of First Things.  I responded to that in “Sheer Hart Attack,” posted at Public Discourse.  Hart also replied to several other critics in the Letters section of the May First Things, and I commented on his remarks in a further post entitled “Discerning the thoughts and intents of Hart.”  What follows is a reply to his latest piece.

Mind and Cosmos roundup

My series of posts on the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos has gotten a fair amount of attention.  Andrew Ferguson’s cover story on Nagel in The Weekly Standard, published when I was six posts into the series, kindly cited it as a “dazzling… tour de force rebutting Nagel’s critics.”  Now that the series is over it seems worthwhile gathering together the posts (along with some related materials) for easy future reference.

Nagel and his critics, Part X

It’s time at long last to bring my series of posts on the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos to a close, before it becomes a lot longer than the book itself.  There isn’t, in any event, much more to say about the naturalist critics, most of whom raise objections similar to those on which I’ve already commented.  But I’ve long intended to finish up the series with a post on reviewers coming at Nagel’s book from the other, theistic direction.  So let’s turn to what John Haldane, William Carroll, Alvin Plantinga, and J. P. Moreland have said about Mind and Cosmos.

Though objecting to materialist forms of naturalism, Nagel agrees with his naturalist critics in rejecting theism.  All of the reviewers I will comment on in this post think he does so too glibly.  Naturally, I agree with them.  However, as longtime readers of this blog know, the arguments and ideas often lumped together under the “theism” label are by no means all of a piece.  Thomists and other Scholastics develop their conception of God and arguments for his existence on metaphysical foundations derived from Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophy.  But most contemporary philosophers of religion do not, relying instead on metaphysical assumptions deriving from the modern empiricist and rationalist traditions which defined themselves in opposition to Aristotelianism and Scholasticism.  This is a difference that makes a difference in the reviews of Nagel now under consideration.  Haldane and Carroll, like me, are Thomists, and their approach to Nagel reflects that fact.  But the objections raised by Moreland and Plantinga are to a significant extent different from the sort a Thomist would make.

Nagel and his critics, Part IX

Returning to my series on the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, let’s look at the recent Commonweal magazine symposium on the book.  The contributors are philosopher Gary Gutting, biologist Kenneth Miller, and physicist Stephen Barr.  I’ll remark on each contribution in turn.

Nagel and his critics, Part VIII

Resuming our series on the serious critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, let’s turn to Simon Blackburn’s review in New Statesman from a few months back.  Blackburn’s review is negative, but it is not polemical; on the contrary, he allows that the book is “beautifully lucid, civilised, modest in tone and courageous in its scope” and even that there is “charm” to it.  Despite the review’s now somewhat notorious closing paragraph (more on which below) I think Blackburn is trying to be fair to Nagel.

EvolutionBlog needs better Nagel critics

EvolutionBlog’s Jason Rosenhouse tells us in a recent post that he hasn’t read philosopher Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.  And it seems obvious enough from his remarks that he also hasn’t read the commentary of any of the professional philosophers and theologians who have written about Nagel sympathetically -- such as my own series of posts on Nagel and his critics, or Bill Vallicella’s, or Alvin Plantinga’s review of Nagel, or Alva Noë’s, or John Haldane’s, or William Carroll’s, or J. P. Moreland’s.  What he has read is a critical review of Nagel’s book written by a non-philosopher, and a couple of sympathetic journalistic pieces about Nagel and some of his defenders.  And on that basis he concludes that “Nagel needs better defenders.”

Nagel and his critics, Part VII

Let’s return to our look at the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.  New commentary on Nagel’s book continues to appear, and to some extent it repeats points made by earlier reviewers I’ve already responded to.  Here I want to say something about Mohan Matthen’s review in The Philosophers Magazine.  In particular, I want to address what Matthen says about the issue of whether conscious awareness could arise in a purely material cosmos.  (Matthen has also commented on Nagel’s book over at the New APPS blog, e.g. here.)

Ferguson on Nagel

In the cover story of the current issue of The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson reviews the controversy generated by Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.  Along the way, he kindly makes reference to what he calls my “dazzling six-part tour de force rebutting Nagel’s critics.”  For interested readers coming over from The Weekly Standard, here are some links to the articles to which Ferguson is referring, with brief descriptions of their contents.

Noë on the origin of life etc.

UC Berkeley philosopher (and atheist) Alva Noë is, as we saw not too long ago, among the more perceptive and interesting critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.  In a recent brief follow-up post, Noë revisits the controversy over Nagel’s book, focusing on the question of the origin of life.  Endorsing some remarks made by philosopher of biology Peter Godfrey-Smith, Noë holds that while we have a good idea of how species originate, there is no plausible existing scientific explanation of how life arose in the first place:

This is probably not, I would say, due to the fact that the relevant events happened a long time ago.  Our problem isn't merely historical in nature, that is.  If that were all that was at stake, then we might expect that, now at least, we would be able to make life in a test tube.  But we can't do that.  We don't know how.

Nagel and his critics, Part VI

We’ve been looking at the critics of Thomas Nagel’s recent book Mind and Cosmos.  Having examined the objections raised by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg, Elliott Sober, Alva Noë, and John Dupré, I want to turn now to some interesting remarks made by Eric Schliesser in a series of posts on Nagel over at the New APPS blog.  Schliesser’s comments concern, first, the way the scientific revolution is portrayed by Nagel’s critics, and second, the role the Principle of Sufficient Reason plays in Nagel’s book.  Most recently, in response to my own series of posts, Schliesser has also commented on the status of naturalism in contemporary philosophy.  Let’s look at each of these sets of remarks in turn.